October 28, 2017

One year will have passed on October 28, 2017 since Fr. Christoper Senk was ripped from his parish and placed on administrative leave.  Let’s be honest  Fr. Senk must be exhausted from having his reputation attacked, from being forced to avoid any public ministry, from being separated from the people who love and support him with full knowledge of the truth of his situation.  The people who have joined in Parishioners for Justice on behalf of Fr. Senk are exhausted as their time, resources, and efforts to engage Bishop Frank Dewane in meaningful thought and discussion are met only with a rope-a-dope defense.  It is easy to be discouraged, to give up, to be tempted to abandon the insistence on truth and justice in favor of an expedient path.  It does not require much imagination to expect that, at least in the short term, injustice might win out.

However, surrender is not an option.  This has been stated clearly by St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians, “Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up.”  Other individuals who have faced trial or who have encountered injustice echo this sentiment.  May their reflections inspire us tirelessly to seek justice with courage.

• Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer (anti-Nazi minister who was hanged)

• No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

— Karl Popper (science philosopher)

• All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

— Thomas Jefferson (author, Declaration of Independence)

• If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

— Desmond Tutu (South African Episcopal bishop)

• There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest it.

— Elie Wiesel (Jewish survivor of German death camps)

• We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

— Elie Wiesel (Jewish survivor of German death camps)

• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

— Martin Luther King Jr. (civil rights advocate)

• In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (anti-Soviet author)

• There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

— Montesquieu (French philosopher, champion of liberty)

• Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

— Robert F. Kennedy (U.S. politician, Attorney General)

• Those called to the service of governance in the church need to have a strong sense of justice, so that any form of injustice becomes unacceptable.

— Pope Francis (266th pope